Women behind Bars: Surviving Injustice

Prison writings that find their way through an incarceration often provide a panacea to the authors from the rigours and injustices of everyday life of imprisonment. Given the historical marginalities that most women inmates come from, these texts tend to be written by women political prisoners, who (often having had access to education) write about their experiences while giving voice to others who cannot. Sudha Bharadwaj’s From Phansi Yard is one such testament to the lived realities of the imprisonment of her fellow inmates, often mirroring the cruel conditions of the lives of people she spent a lifetime working with as a trade union lawyer and human rightsactivist. The Introduction to the book is thus a testimony to her determination and the unusual choices that led to her working with marginalized Dalits and Adivasis and mine and factory workers of Chhattisgarh, where much of her life was spent before her arrest in the Bhima Koregaon case.